I graduated last year with a PhD in a humanities field of research. Last year, I was helping a friend from engineering to revise his thesis before resubmitting it after the viva. Then a friend of his also asked me for help, and so on. So I have been looking over a few theses from engineering, mostly from IT related topics. I just help with copyediting, making sure everything is in order, tables, figures, references, etc.

Now, coming form the humanities, I knew everything that was in my thesis. Every single line. So I was quite surprised to find out that my friends dont seem to know what's inside theirs. I ask them 'what did you mean here' and they dont know. Fair enough, they are not native speakers, but neither I am! Is this normal for sciences? There's so much data that maybe some of it doesen't make sense to you? I am not sure if I should think they simply copy-pasted stuff without giving it too much thought, or maybe science research is too complicated for somehone like me (not good with numbers and equations).

Also I wanted to say something to PhD candidates: I know its hard at the end, but make sure your thesis is in order before resubmitting it. The last guy I helped, his thesis didnt have page numbers. I wasnt sure why, so I asked him if in engineering its ok not to have page numbers, and he asked me to put them in. This is one day before the resubmission deadline. Crazy.

No it's not normal - a student should know what every line of their thesis means in the sciences too. I have also had to help many people with basic Word functions, so that doesn't surprise me, although it shouldn't be that way!

Thanks Treeoflife
I kind of suspected that. I just can't wrap my head around the fact that again and again, I asked question like 'do you mean this or do you mean that?' And I could not get a straight answer. Which kinda puts me in an awkward postion, because I feel like I am not doing a very good job! I guess in the future I am going to have to refuse doing these things so late.